


It's About Boyd

by MonsterTesk



Series: Doornails and Daisies [2]
Category: Justified
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-25
Updated: 2014-01-25
Packaged: 2018-01-10 00:05:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1152425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MonsterTesk/pseuds/MonsterTesk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like all of Raylan's stories are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's About Boyd

It’s a story about Boyd. Winona can tell. Doesn’t matter that Raylan isn’t saying his name or that he never does when he thinks others can hear him. Or maybe that’s how she can tell. She’s got quiet feet and more perception than Raylan gives her credit for. Maybe he can’t help it. Whichever the case, Winona can always tell now that she knows his past, knows all of the things Raylan used to keep buried under his ribs and over his lungs.

She finds it more than fitting that the last words of Boyd Crowder were titled “Fire in the Hole,” because that book was more explosive than any dynamite Boyd ever got his hands on.

Raylan is holding their baby, the sweetest little girl that Winona has ever seen, and tells her about the bravest man to ever live. It’s a story about mining. It’s a story about mudslides and coal and dirt that never comes out from under your fingernails. It’s a story that has been sanitized for the ears of a child.

He’s been telling her this story since she was three minutes old. Raylan never says Boyd’s name but Winona knows, knows as much as she always knows, that all his stories are inevitably about Boyd. Even the ones that look like they’re about her.

He tells this story to their little girl and leaves out that there was a dark haired man with muddy green eyes and a smile like sin.

He paints himself like a white-hatted cowboy whose hat may have been just a little bit dirty, turned gray by coal dust and slurries. Raylan talks about a hatless criminal who saved the cowboy’s life.

Winona stands outside the nursery door and listens to the slight creek of the rocking chair they used to use to rock their baby to sleep back when she was small enough the whole of her fit in their arms as Raylan tells her the story in a calm voice that holds only a little bit of irony and a barely there hint of something else.

Winona thinks it’s longing because he never tells these stories when he thinks Winona can hear. That’s how she knows that they mean more to him than he’s saying or will ever let on. He doesn’t even say that he’s in them, not really, but who the hell else would be a hat-wearing cowboy with hands stained dark from coal?

Their daughter quiets down as she always does when Raylan tells her stories. Winona can tell that she’s asleep by the way Raylan’s voice softens, fills with grief and amusement. He keeps talking even though she’s asleep, sounding like a man inside the only confessional he’ll allow himself. It’s like he wants to—needs to finish the story.

Winona knows that Raylan isn’t the most talkative man on Earth. Hell, the word taciturn was invented for him. Both because of its definition and because of the way it seems to say at points, “he silently turns.”

And he does. But he never changes. He just… shifts a little to show a different angle.

The story ends, as it always does, with, “Good Hat owed his life to the Hatless Criminal. He will always have a debt to him… I’m here now. Because of him.”

Winona begins to walk back to her room as quietly as she came, shoulders stiff but body loose and dressing gown wrapped tight around her. She knows what he’s actually saying.

She might not have always been the best at interpreting Raylan but she knows that when he speaks of a good man who maybe made some bad decisions or, hell, purposely made some bad decisions that he’s saying there’s a love like none other; a love brought on by circumstance and the threat of black lung. A conditional love. One whose physical presence was fleeting and fragile but whose hands dug nails hard into Raylan’s hips so that when he managed to break free he was left with black scars of it that crisscrossed its way in front of him for the rest of his life. There’s a love, conditional, that tattooed its ghost onto his heart and barricaded the way for any who might follow it.

It’s a love that will last because it won’t ever be spoken, because… Winona smiles to herself as she slides back in bed, knowing Raylan won’t be in again. Not tonight. Tonight he’ll pour himself a glass of whiskey and sit on the porch, feet naked and chest bared. He’ll raise the glass to the night sky and stretch his lips in a smile that he’s never given anyone else. Raylan will say it then. He’ll say it because he thinks no one can hear him.

“Boyd,” he’ll say before taking a sip of his whiskey, legs pulling the denim over his knees tight. He’ll say it just the once and only because Raylan aint a talker. At least not anywhere his baby girl isn’t concerned.

Winona smiles to herself, more comforted than saddened by the knowledge that it wasn’t her—or only her anyway—that made them fail the first time around.

Because their love was not a true love but an honest one nonetheless. She knows that the reason why Raylan can never love her enough to make it work is because he could never love someone else enough.

“Because it’s a story about Boyd,” she whispers to the empty pillow next to her. “The story has always been about Boyd.”

Just like Raylan.

It’s only too sad or maybe just right that a story about Boyd ends in Raylan’s bullet. 


End file.
